We on the ops meetups team had a trial meeting on meetpad.opendev.org this morning and for the most part it worked very well (detailed feedback below). Speaking personally, I am very happy to see an open source solution for video conferencing being adopted by the foundation to some extent. I had and continue to have reservations about Zoom, but at the end of the day no matter how well they respond to the security and privacy concerns it will still be a proprietary solution and no more true to the openstack tenets than slack is as a replacement for irc.

feedback

- etherpad integration is cool but several of us found the window seemed to disappear inexplicably

- colored highlighting of fragments on the etherpad showed up overlapped for some but not all meeting members, obscuring some text

- background blurring seemed very heavy for some participants computers and this possibly lead to some sessions locking up

- it's not clear what named meetings persistence is, for example a named meeting from yesterday is still shown today, but doesn't have the password I applied yesterday

My guess is some (all?) of this is just how Jitsi is right now.

The team (openstack ops meetups) is now talking about possibly hosting a global ops meetup on this platform. How can we determine when and if the infra for this is ready for it, and how many participants is a reasonable cap? What about streaming, can we stream the whole thing continuously to youtube? We are thinking that each topic would have a small number of presenters/participants in the video conference itself, but allow a larger group to see it on youtube and contribute via the etherpad. Is this a reasonable plan?

Thanks for doing this!

Chris

On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 12:57 PM Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> wrote:

On 2020-05-05 12:06:42 -0400 (-0400), Chris Morgan wrote:
[...]
> we had a quick IRC meeting today, and also a trial run at an open
> source based video conference meeting using jitsi via an instance
> running on infra provided by Erik McCormick. This seems to be
> promising. We'll look into trialling some ops related events
> leveraging this.
[...]

It's probably been flying under the radar a bit so far, but the
OpenDev community has put together an Etherpad-integrated Jitsi-Meet
service at https://meetpad.opendev.org/ which you're free to try out
as well. We'd love feedback and help tuning it. Also if you want to
reuse anything we've done to set it up, the Ansible playbook we use
is here:

https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/playbooks/service-meetpad.yaml

It utilizes this role to install and configure jitsi-meet containers
with docker-compose (mostly official docker.io/jitsi images, though
we build our own jitsi-meet-web published under docker.io/opendevorg
which applies our Etherpad integration patch):

https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/playbooks/roles/jitsi-meet

We're not making any stability or reusability guarantees on the
Ansible orchestration (or our custom image which will hopefully
disappear once https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/pull/5270 is
accepted upstream), but like everything we run in OpenDev we publish
it for the sake of transparency, in case anyone else wants to help
us or take some ideas for their own efforts.
--
Jeremy Stanley

--

Chris Morgan <mihalis68@gmail.com>